What a humiliated Israel, whose political establishment has seen the return of Sharon's syndrome, is ready for

Written by: Dean Džebić

The airstrike on a column of civilians withdrawing from the northern to the southern part of Gaza confirms that, according to some established pattern of symptoms of complete madness, Sharon's syndrome has returned to the Israeli political establishment.

The attack on a column known to be unarmed is most often carried out by the pilot at his own discretion in executing a "free hunt" order, i.e., a "find and destroy" mission.

Israeli Phalangists and Maronite militias had a similar mission and consistently fulfilled it in 1982 during the first Lebanon war, when between 700 and 1,700 Palestinian and Lebanese refugees were killed in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps over two days.

However, what do the massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese in the Sabra and Shatila camps and today's killing in Gaza have in common? The common denominator is the humiliation that Israel has experienced several times from peoples it does not consider capable of such outmaneuvering.

Chronologically, every time the terrorist organizations Hezbollah or Hamas catch Israel off guard, the response by inertia must be disproportionate to the extreme.

Ultimately, since 1948, Israel has been governed mostly by former soldiers from the position of prime minister, who, in all likelihood, carry within themselves a different vision of the response to Hamas, the PLO, Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah.

By their mental makeup, soldiers in the position of IDF prime minister are prone to excessive use of force precisely for revanchist reasons, i.e., battlefield experiences.

For this occasion, we can call such a phenomenon Sharon's syndrome, which terminologically would denote voluntarism in managing the military assets of a state with the aim of fulfilling personal beliefs and goals, ultimately a form of stepping out of the armed forces' chain of command with maximum leniency towards command responsibility and all forms of violation of the norms of international war law.

Given that as Minister of Defense he completely took full control of the Israel Defense Forces, Ariel Sharon, as Minister of Defense, almost tore the IDF away from the control and supervision of the Knesset and the Israeli government.

In Operation "Peace for Galilee" during 1982, in the southern and western parts of Lebanon, Sharon led almost a personal war against the PLO in cooperation with the Maronite Phalangists. He would avoid calls from Prime Minister Begin as well as reporting at government sessions.

In his memoirs, he explains his conflict with Prime Minister Begin with the words: "By noon I would fight the terrorists, and in the afternoon I would fight my government." As a former general from the wars of 1967 and 1973, Sharon wanted a final, military, and unconditional solution that, in its radicalism, deviated from the requested operation, which was supposed to push the remnants of the PLO further 40 km from the Israeli-Lebanese border.

Ultimately, at enormous cost, Sharon got his final solution, given that the remnants of the PLO were defeated at a fairly high price. It was precisely this high price from the battlefield, as a return interest, that came back to the civilians and refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps as a form of complete blindness fueled by hatred, i.e., as Sharon's syndrome.

In fact, we are talking about a dangerous personalization of power that fanatical hatred instructs into a framework that, in the conditions of the Middle East, represents almost a dialectical conviction. Ultimately, the perception of life in Palestine and the entire Middle East is different than in Europe, given that the local fanaticism in implementing any state program, be it liberation, emancipation, or occupation, reaches unreasonable magnitudes.

In these and such conditions, Sharon's syndrome appears as a special form of technical-technological capabilities for the physical destruction of the opponent, which in previous practice has been immanent only to Israel. This type of counter-terrorist struggle is actually a symmetrical response to an asymmetric threat.

Simply put, Israel responds to terror with an even stronger gradation of terror, establishing an unprecedented example in history of a terrorist state waging war against terrorist organizations.

If we accept that Hezbollah is an example of state terrorism conducted as a non-state actor of Iran, then we must also accept the existence of the terrorist state of Israel, which, given its incurable Sharon's syndrome, represents a political entity that exists to destroy and destroys to survive.